The Internet of Things and the future of manufacturing

Executives at Robert Bosch and McKinsey experts discuss the technology-driven changes that promise to trigger a new industrial revolution. The Internet of Things is going to he huge and manufacturing is just one facet. Industry 4.0, as the manufacturing sector calls it, will remove the difference between information and materials, because products will be inextricably linked to “their” information.

The Internet of Things has already set in motion the idea of a fourth industrial revolution—a new wave of technological changes that will decentralize production control and trigger a paradigm shift in manufacturing.

Markus Löffler

Given the Internet of Things—or Industry 4.0 as we call it when referring to manufacturing production—it is highly likely that the world of production will become more and more networked until everything is interlinked with everything else.

Siegfried Dais

One core element is the ability to create models. It is essential to translate the physical world into a format that can be handled by IT. This requires mathematical, domain, market, and context know-how. In the connected world, we cannot separate the physical world from business processes. We capture this in the slogan “process2device.” That means a physical device becomes an active part of a business process: delivering data, sending events, and processing rules.